Since becoming a SAHM, even if only temporarily, I’ve taken on more of the household chores.

Q. fought me on this, because he felt that he should still be doing his share, but I won in the end, because I didn’t want him to spend his miniscule amounts of free time on the weekends cleaning. Lately he’s been spending much of his free time trying out recipes from his make-ahead cookbook, so I have less cooking to do during the week, but given he loves to cook, and I don’t get much pleasure out of it, that suits me fine.

So Q. cooks on the weekends, and I cook during the week (mostly) and the rest of the day-to-day cleaning is my responsibility.

I am surely not the only mother to admit that sometimes having to vacuum is a nice break. E. can entertain himself for an hour if I am cleaning or cooking, but apparently can’t manage it for five minutes if I’m trying to do something just for myself (hence the importance of his daily ‘quiet time’- it’s for me, not him). And so I enjoy being left alone to my thoughts, even if I’m pushing a vacuum while I do it.

I am, I will freely admit, not a great housekeeper. I manage to vacuum weekly, and clean the bathrooms weekly, but I had to write “mop floors” into my monthly to-do lists to make sure I would actually mop them 12 times this year. Dusting is done sporadically. Our windows are a mess.

But boy am I good at laundry.

I am a machine when it comes to laundry. I do all of it- my clothes, E.’s clothes, Q.’s clothes, sheets, towels- on Saturday mornings (plus one load on Friday nights if E. has swimming and I have to clean his swimmers and his towel right away). Usually by the time lunch is over the last load is in the dryer and everything that needs to be hung up to dry is hanging and all the other loads are folded and clean sheets are back on the beds and clean towels are back in the bathrooms.

I just chip away at it around our usual Saturday morning routine- breakfast, going to the farmer’s market, hanging out, getting lunch ready.

And I LOVE doing it. I love taking piles and piles of dirty clothes and linens and turning them into baskets of neatly folded clean clothes ready to be put away.

I take enormous satisfaction from doing this job, and I doubt I will ever relinquish it to Q. once I’m working again and we return to a more balanced division of household labour. (He used to do his own laundry, but it’s much more efficient if I do it all at once.)

But I don’t really enjoy vacuuming, and I hate hate hate cleaning bathrooms.

What about you? What household chores (if any) do you take pride in and enjoy doing well? Which ones are necessary evils?

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.

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6 responses to “Cleaning house”

Here from Mel’s MM. Household chores ranked from evil to joy:
cleaning toilets, bathrooms, vacuuming, ironing, laundry, grocerie shopping, cooking, baking.
I believe cleaning windows is optional. Bird droppings will rain off eventually. I do not want to know how much our household would suffer if we didn’t have our help taking care of the four evil chores every week. Although our toddler seems to like cleaning toilets and colourful bottles of cleaning product. She might actually be delighted if we let her discover how a spray bottle works…

I love doing laundry too. Sorting. Organizing. Making all the linens fresh and beautiful again. If I could, I think I would change my bedsheets every single day! Dusting is my nemesis. Lord I absolutely HATE dusting!

We split things semi-equally, but we have equal away-at-work time, so that makes sense. I do laundry because I’m like you: it’s SO satisfying, and Pea would let it lay around for years once clean. I do bathrooms, he does the kitchen, and he vacuums to balance the laundry. It’s not a perfect split, but it leverages the cleaning we both value. I’d never clean the kitchen and he’d never clean the bathrooms if left to our own devices.

The only chore I drag my heels on is cleaning Truman’s cage. Other than that, I love cleaning. I love laundry, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning. I love all of it. And dishes. Oooooh, dishes. I was a dishwasher for a summer, and it was my happiest job.

Dh has always done more of the cooking. Since we’re both home now, we both clean — he does the downstairs, including the kitchen (because he loves it, for some weird reason), & all the vacuuming. I do the upstairs (including the bathroom, which he loathes) and the laundry. I don’t particularly love to iron, but fortunately, there is a lot less of it now that we’re not working.

I’m with you on mopping the floors. As I said, dh does the vacuuming, but mopping is my job. I love the results, and I even bought myself one of those steam mops as motivation, but so far, I don’t mop the floors with any greater frequency. :p

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ABOUT ME

Just your average married, infertile, Canadian woman. I spent the first half of my thirties focused on two goals: motherhood and a PhD. IVF/ICSI brought us our son (E.) in 2011, but a sibling eluded us, despite our best efforts. In between pregnancy, parenting, and trying again, I wrestled the PhD into submission and defended in 2014. In the summer of 2015 I made a number of diet changes that led to the ultimate triumph over PCOS: a completely unexpected natural pregnancy. Our daughter (P.) arrived in June of 2016. A perpetual student, I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up, except write and run.